


Imagine (a better reality)

by PepperVix



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Consequences, Emotional Manipulation, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Gen, No more chances, Sans (Undertale) Remembers Resets, Soul Trauma, Souls, Undertale Saves and Resets, non-romantic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-19
Updated: 2018-12-19
Packaged: 2019-09-23 01:42:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17071076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PepperVix/pseuds/PepperVix
Summary: Life Underground is unrepentant torture. Time seems to have it's own priorities, and voices from the past keep whispering in his ears. Stranded in a broken timeline wounds and vulnerabilities are exposed, and not everybody is willing to cooperate with old enemies. After all, it's impossible to mend the scars a broken reality has left in it's wake.





	Imagine (a better reality)

He kicked up snow as he tore through the fluffy, pristine piles of white. He could sense the presence of another just behind him, could hear their echoing laughter through their heavy breathing. His own breathing came in shuddering spurts whenever he could spare it, but he found he couldn’t much. His stamina was starting to wear ragged as he burst into a familiar clearing. He sped past his sentry station, sparing it only a fleeting glance before he pressed onward. Trees suddenly jumped from the ground on both sides of him, and he recognized the familiar path. Dread settled in the depths of his soul, plunging like into ice water as he slowed down. He could hear the kid panting behind him, but even her quick footsteps had slowed to a leisurely stroll. It seemed she had recognized it as well. 

Sans stopped walking. He swore under his breath. His chest shuddered as he struggled to regain lost air, his damaged rib-cage aided little in this act. She had caught him a few times during the run, hitting him with the blunt end of her knife and encouraging him to keep going with disingenuous inspiring words. In turn he had lost her a few times, leading her in circles and making her shout in frustration when she got fed up with his cheating. In the beginning it was easy, but now their stamina had worn thin and snapped, and here they were still chasing. It felt like it had been days since he had a rest, but it was hard to tell underground sometimes.

Sans followed the trail to the end of the path, eye-lights hazy as he took in the towering structure that was the one way in to the ruins. He had never been there himself, it had been abandoned and sealed long before he was even alive. They had finally reached the end of the line, he could run no further. He should have realized that they would reach this point eventually, he was never the victor in these games of theirs after all.

Sans collapsed onto the ancient door, his spine cracking softly as he collided with the firm surface. He grunted as his injuries seemed to explode upon contact, his racing soul skipping a beat in a flurry of them. The kid started to laugh hysterically, breath coming in wheezing puffs of victory.

“Sans~” The child called, her voice steadily becoming louder as she grew closer. “You're not very good at playing tag, are you? You're supposed to be running, silly skeleton!” She giggled, her sneering face now clear to him as she crept down the path, stifling the giggles that seemed to erupt from her so often with one hand. “Don't you know what happens when I catch you?” Her grin split her face with manic glee, her eyes blazing with triumph. Sans clenched his eyes shut as she slowly came to a stop in front of him and the door. She stood there for a second, catching her breath, then she leaned in close; Sans could feel her hot, quick breath on his face, shying away to no avail. “You're it.”

She dug the knife into his chest, this time it wasn’t the blunt side. Sans tried not to scream, but the knife sunk into his sternum agonizingly slow. Cracks sprouted from the puncture, but he still refused, clamping his sockets shut and baring his teeth in stubborn resolve. It broke through the other side, Sans’s struggling only made it worse, adding to the array of cracks splitting away from it. Sans shuddered and groaned, kicking his legs and frantically trying to wriggle out of her grasp. Her grin turned up at the edges and her eyes glinted as she spotted the more sensitive target. Hidden in his rib cage was his steadily pulsing soul. 

“Hmmmm…” She braced the knife against its surface testingly, teasing it just a breath away from the gently beating flesh. 

Sans’s eye lights went out, in a deep, empty voice he warned her “D O N T .”

She plunged the knife in.

Her eyes relished the scream that she had finally succeeded dragging out if him. It ripped through his throat and seemed to tear it up as the knife pierced that gently glowing organ. It tapered off after a long while, his voice too broken and abused to continue. The child’s eyes gleamed with mirth seeing him unable to control his usually stubborn refusal to show pain. “Such pretty screams, Sans. I’ve heard so many different ones from different monsters, but none have ever made me pity them as much as yours.” She whispered sweetly in his ear. Sans shuddered, his bones rattling against each other as the knife remained lodged in his soul; he knew she could see him fucking shaking too, but he found it was hard to care when it hurt so. M u c h.

“-look at you!” She chortled. “You’re stuck, aren't you Sans?” Sans glared up at her, his hatred dampened by the overwhelming pain. “Oh-don’t look at me like that, or I might be tempted to leave you there! Wouldn’t that be so funny?” She got up from her kneeling position, wiping the tears from her eyes. “I think I just might.” She snickered, beginning to back away from him. Sans’s eye sockets flew open, he tried to jerk forward. But it hurt. It hurt so damn much… Pain roared through him as he moved, cold overtaking him the likes of which he had never felt so intensely before.

“wait-! chara!-frisk?!” Sans called out to them desperately, “come back! you can't leave me like this!”

“I can do whatever I want.” And in the next second, she was gone. Sans sighed, head thudding against the door in resignation. 

He screwed his sockets closed, shuddering and moaning quietly as the cold overtook him. Every pulse of his soul was met with agonizing pain against the knife that had been driven right through it, pinning him to the door. It did not help that his soul had started to beat out of control. Dust started to flake away from his rib cage, his eye-lights sputtering out. 

Sans had resigned himself to his fate by the time he lost sight of Frisk's slowly retreating form. In this predictable world, things happened just as they had, or in similar ways over and over. In itself, life was monotonous, repetitive, predictive in a passive, ambient way. Monsters woke up, went to work, completed the same tasks, experienced the same events; it was just the way society worked. But there was always time. Time was constant, it flowed without relent. At least that was how it was supposed to work. Never once in his life did sans foresee the loss of that one constant. And through sheer force of will, time had bent itself in two. It halted and rewound, erased, and revived, twisted into something unrecognizable. Ugly.

So, experiencing something unpredictable really shouldn't have surprised him as much as it did.

“H-Hello?” Is-Is someone there?” Came a soft, motherly voice. Though instead of it's usual calm, collected tone, she sounded unsettled, bordering on panicked. “Are you hurt?” She asked, worry edging the question, as if she feared yet also expected a certain answer. Sans shuddered against the knife, wondering if it was really worth his efforts. The pain helped him decide.

Sans tried very hard to communicate his predicament, but the words just wouldn't come. Just a small, shuddering wave of cold that pressed upon his bones, seeping into his very essence. He let out a small gasp, his soul pulsing again, sending the same sensations but worse. More intense than the time before. It didn't help things either, that with the cold metal of the knife plunged deep into his core, every twitch and pulse of his heart was against the blade of it. And alarmingly quickly after only a few pulsations he started to become incoherent, thoughts muddying together into threads of painful pleas and desperate disjointed wishes. 

“i...h...el..p..” No use. Why was he calling out anyways? Hadn't there been… someone. 

No. There was only those children. The ones who mocked and laughed at his suffering. He remembered those piercing brown eyes: red could be seen glinting in the dredges of those pits. The hint of determination, so potent you could see it in their eyes as they cut down every living thing in the underground that stood in their way or didn't. Reloading, cutting up time to their every whim. He could barely tell which was which at times, they shared a body but sometimes it seemed they shared even a mind too. Switching and shifting from one soul to the other, each playing out their own curiousites on this helpless world. The only difference he could detect was the slight difference of preferences. The original one, Frisk, tended to be more creative in her ways then the second. She liked his reactions. She seemed to genuinely care for new things, on the other hand Chara was content just to dish pain out like the world's worst lunch lady.

Cold fingers worked their way from his chest extending to the tips of his toe bones. He shuddered in vain, calling out once again to someone he felt should be there - wasn't there somebody? He had sworn there was a voice - his felt cracked and broken, raw and quiet from screaming. 

“i-ineed help…. please…” he didn't know if he could even be heard over the breeze, his eyes slipped closed in hopelessness. A wound through the soul was one of the slowest, most painful ways to die. He had died enough to attest to the tentative rumors that circulated the darkest areas of the underground. Sans didn't know how long it would take, just to finally die. The small town of Snowdin could be so quiet. It's sleepy silence could cover you like a blanket: muffling everything for miles in it's oppressive hold; sometimes it was unbearable to live in such a place. Especially now.

His weak fragile fingers clasped around the handle of the knife, tugging at it fruitlessly. It hurt more this way, as was it useless. The knife was lodged in with all the strength of a LOVE drunk child. It barely budged when he pulled. Sans thoughts started to race to other ways to end it all, his fingers twitching and his body convulsing in desperate agreement.

“I-I can…” That voice again, familiar. “I will help you.” pain jolted through his joints, buzzing and twisting across his bones. The knife in his soul was moving. His body was being pushed forwards. He scrambled helplessly on the snow, willing it to stop! The door was fucking moving! The knife managed to nick off another part of his soul. He screamed. 

“Oh my!” Came a clearly surprised voice. Sans was whimpering again, pulling at the knife in a futile attempt to free himself from the door. 

Something warm and fuzzy grasped his phalanges, gently leading them away from the handle. They themselves worked the knife from the door, with some great strength Sans himself did not possess. The knife slowly began to budge from the door. Sans felt it's every move in his soul like cold white pain. He hadn't even noticed he had been screaming again till the movement stopped. 

“S-Should I continue, you seem to be in a lot of pain…” the voice was full of uncertainty, but Sans could detect genuine care in those words. She was going to get the knife out of his soul. He would be free.

Sans managed to stop screaming, gasping and shuttering, he grasped the hands in desperation.  
“n-no please… don't stop… don't leave me like this… please…” He continued to mumble and plead even as the hands went again to the handle.

“I-I'll make this as quick and painless as I can… hang in there…” her hands didn't tremble like his had, they grasped it tight and firm, steadying his shaking body. And with one, firm pull; she got it out in one go. It burst free from his soul, then his sternum, finally being disconnected from him completely as she threw it back into the snow, as if desperate to be rid of it. Sans couldn't help the screaming, but when he managed to stop, he found himself in a warm embrace: soft fabric against his skull, and fuzzy paws rubbing his back in gentle motions. The cold was gone. The knife was no longer in him...

“You are okay,” a sweet voice murmured gently. “You are okay now, I have got you.” Sans began to feel woozy, and before long he had passed out as the woman rocked him in her arms.


End file.
